GET OUR UPDATES

An Evening with the 2018 NYC Emerging Writers Fellows

Tuesday October 2, 201807:00 pm

Tags: Event

Video

The MacDowell Colony

521 West 23 Street, 2nd Floor

New York, NY 10011

We celebrated our nine 2018 Emerging Writers Fellows, who shared their work for the first time since being selected for the program in June. The evening included readings byCara Blue Adams, Mariam Bazeed, Diane Chang, Sidik Fofana, Kim Coleman Foote, Chantal Johnson, Jeremy J. Kamps, Katherine Augusta Mayfield, and Kimarlee Nguyen.

This program is generously funded by a grant from the Jerome Foundation, matched by additional funds from individuals. The 2018 fellows were selected in a blind judging by our panel: Hannah Lillith Assadi (Sonora), Jaroslav Kalfar (Spaceman of Bohemia), and Weike Wang (Chemistry).

Cara Blue Adams’s stories appear in The Kenyon Review, Epoch, The Missouri Review, The Mississippi Review, The Sun,and Narrative. She is the recipient of the Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize and the Missouri Review Peden Prize and has been awarded scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, and the VCCA, along with a 2016-17 New York-Quebec Artist Exchange Grant. She is completing a story collection and a novel. Originally from Vermont, she lives in Brooklyn.

Mariam Bazeed is a non-binary Egyptian immigrant living in a rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn. She has an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College, and is at work on a collection of stories and her first novel. In addition to being a writer of prose, poetry, plays, and personal essays, Mariam is a singer and performance artist. Her work has been published in print and online, and she has been a recipient of fellowships from the Asian American Writers Workshop, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU, and Lambda Literary. She has been awarded residencies at the Marble House Project, the Millay Colony, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Hedgebrook. Her play, Peace Camp Org, a Queer anti-Zionist musical comedy, will be staged at the Wild Project as part of the Fresh Fruit Festival in July 2018. Mariam runs a monthly world-music salon in Brooklyn, and is a slow student of Arabic music.

Diane Chang has an MFA from the University of Michigan and an MD from the University of Chicago. She currently works as a physician caring for the incarcerated at Rikers Island. She has received two Hopwood Awards, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a Fulbright grant to write in Shanghai. Her fiction and creative non-fiction appear in Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, Green Mountains Review, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. She lives in Queens with her husband and son and is working on a novel.

Sidik Fofana received an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU and teaches public school in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Epiphany and the Sewanee Review.

Kim Coleman Foote is a writer of fiction, essays, and experimental prose. In addition to an NEA Literature Fellowship and a NYFA Fellowship in fiction, she has received writing fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Hedgebrook, Illinois Arts Council, and elsewhere. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Black Renaissance Noire, FLAPPERHOUSE, Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, and more. She is currently working on a novel about the trans-Atlantic slave trade and a story collection fictionalizing her family's experience of the Great Migration from Alabama to New Jersey. She grew up in New Jersey and now calls Brooklyn home.

Chantal Johnson holds an MA in English from New York University and a JD from Stanford Law School. She is a Senior Staff Attorney at Brooklyn Legal Services, where she represents tenants facing eviction. She is currently finishing her first novel and beginning an essay collection on feminist ethics, psychology, and mental health law.

Jeremy J. Kamps grew up in rural Wisconsin and now lives in Brooklyn. His fiction has received publication in The Madison Review as well as the H.E. Francis Award (“The Source of Everything”), the Tom Howard/John Reid Fiction Prize (“Drawing Water”), The Little Patuxent (“Locked Out”). Also a playwright, his plays have been produced/developed with The Public Theater, The Fountain Theater (LA), Company Cypher, Ugly Rhino, Spectrum Theater Ensemble and Esperance Theater Company. MFA: NYU.

Katherine Augusta Mayfield is a graduate of the Columbia University MFA program. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in No Tokens and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her novella, “But If You Tame Me, Then We Shall Need Each Other,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center, Rufus Stone, and Gullkistan. She lives in Queens and is at work on her first novel, The Reenactors.

As a full-time English teacher at The Brooklyn Latin School, Kimarlee Nguyen spends an inordinate amount of time trying to find new ways to make essay-writing fun for fourteen-year olds. The rest of her free time is devoted to writing her first novel. A recent graduate of Long Island University's MFA program, Kimarlee's fiction has appeared in PANK, Hyphen Magazine and The Adroit Journal, among others. She has been awarded fellowships from VONA, The Fine Arts Work Center, The Key West Literary Seminar and the Anderson Center at Towerview.